[weaksauce]

> has created an attitude of "keyboard doesn't matter";

I think you would be surprised at just how powerful the keyboard subsystem in osx is and how malleable it is with some programs or even just editing the plist shortcuts. every menu item in any application can be given a per app or universal shortcut in `system preferences | keyboard | shortcuts | app shortcuts`

You can also use a thing like hammerspoon to do whatever you can imagine basically too... i have a few things for window manipulations via hammerspoon.

You can set up very complex keyboard re-mappings/shortcuts using something like karabiner elements.

you can also change the keyboard access to be navigable via tab in keyboard settings too.

and you can access the menu via ctrl-f2 by default. those settings are changeable too via the keyboard preference pane.

i think you'd be surprised at how much apple cares about accessibility so keyboard nav is not just a power user thing.

At the end of the day I think apple put a lot of thought into the UI and i'd feel pretty stymied going back to windows.(though now the power utilities finally let you remap the windows key to something more useful like ctrl.

[eviks]

Except you can't bind every menu item: some menu names are dynamic, so you can't bind to them, and not all the keys are supported, and there is no left/right modifier differentiation. Also, you have to retype the full command path by hand, which is insane, so you can't do that either (you should be able to just hover over a command and press keybind to rebind)

Even with the awesomeness of Karabiner Elements there are some unfortunate limitations

But yeah, I'd be surprised if it were a powerful system, that's so rare in the keyboard land...

[snowe2010]

Can’t you handle a lot of that with Automator? Honestly it’s funny to see so many people saying Mac is terrible at this when I can’t imagine a worse OS for shortcuts than windows and Linux you have to script everything. Mac managed to make it user friendly and scriptable at the same time.

[eviks]

A lot of what? What's your Automator handler that I can select a dynamic menu item and change those two keybinds with my arbitrary key combo?

Also, how is it user friendly to require users to retype the full menu taxonomy???

[snowe2010]

>What's your Automator handler that I can select a dynamic menu item and change those two keybinds with my arbitrary key combo?

no clue, I don't use automator, but from what I understand of applescript and automator this should be completely possible. For what it's worth I use Hammerspoon like the other commentor and it's by far the best system I've seen for any OS. Also the more people that use it the better it gets so I highly recommend it.

>Also, how is it user friendly to require users to retype the full menu taxonomy???

I mean... you're able to change any arbitrary menu item in any program that exists. That's extremely powerful. I don't really know how you would make it make it any more user friendly.

[eviks]

I've already tried Hammerspoon a while ago

> any arbitrary menu item in any program that exists

That's false

> I don't really know how you would make it make it any more user friendly.

Just read my comment, it tells you exactly how to make it user friendly. And it's easy to come up with a few more ideas

[snowe2010]

> That's false

In what way?

> Just read my comment, it tells you exactly how to make it user friendly.

I’ve reread all of your comments in this thread and find no such thing.

[weaksauce]

use hammerspoon[0] if you are so dead set on making this edgecase work. on the whole the system is quite flexible.

there's also applescript that can do a lot of other things too. I dislike the language but it's fairly powerful too.

[0] http://www.hammerspoon.org/docs/hs.application.html#getMenuI...

[eviks]

I'm not dead set, that's why I wouldn't waste time on writing a "this can take a little while to complete, because quite a large number of round trips are required to the source application, to get the information" in another bad language when it's much simpler to use Karabiner to send the offending keybind

By the way, what would I do with this menu info, is there another function to permanently rebind a given menu item?

I was just pointing a few fundamental flaws in this "surprisingly powerful" system

[weaksauce]

you can write a hammerspoon script that will intercept some hotkey you want to use for that menu item and select it yes.

[userbinator]

I was talking about pre-OSX.